New particle

In the vast particle landscape, there are, to borrow a phrase, known knowns (the Standard Model, for example), unknown unknowns (exotic extensions of the Standard Model and beyond), and those ever-interesting known unknowns. A recent CMS observation perfectly fits into this third category.

Another day, another particle. Unlike the Higgs boson, the neutral Xi_b baryon is not expected to solve any deep, outstanding mysteries. But, sightings of its excited state are another first for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

A never-before-seen subatomic particle has popped into existence inside the world's largest atom smasher, bringing physicists a step closer to unraveling the mystery of how matter is put together in the universe.

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters claiming that they’d discovered a new Baryon particle. This is the Xi_b^*0 – which is composed of three quarks: a strange quark, a beauty quark, and an up quark.